


Appearances to the Contrary

by levitatethis



Category: Heroes - Fandom
Genre: Alternate Reality, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-05-18
Updated: 2010-05-18
Packaged: 2017-10-09 13:17:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,886
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/87904
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/levitatethis/pseuds/levitatethis
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A train ride proves very interesting.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Appearances to the Contrary

_“How we like to sing along   
'Though the words are wrong   
It really, really, really could happen   
Yes, it really, really, really could happen   
When the days they seem to fall through you   
Well, just let them go” _   
**-Blur, ** _**The Universal** _

 

“Do you never tire of stalking me?”

Ignoring the curious glance of the young woman seated to his right, Sylar stands taller, gripping the overhead bar, and smirks at Mohinder who in turn rolls his eyes and purses his lips.

Sylar leans into his space and raises an eyebrow. “Your warm welcomes keep bringing me back.”

Mohinder turns away, looking over his left shoulder and mumbles, “Passive aggressive condes—,”

“Still talking to yourself I see.”

Mohinder looks back at him and Sylar continues. “You’re aware I can hear you no matter how quiet you think you are?”

“As if I’d ever forget,” Mohinder says and Sylar fights the smile that instinctively turns up the corners of his mouth at Mohinder’s expected defiance, particularly in the unsafe haven of a crowded New York train.

If it were anyone else, Sylar would label the behavior as a reckless death wish. And though that may very well be the case with Mohinder, Sylar recognizes the courage at the center of the act. Mohinder is consistently willing himself to be hurt in place of others if an attack is deemed a suitable punishment for not backing down. Sylar likens it to a self-imposed punishment for not stopping him when the opportunity first presented itself.

All things considered, the inequality of abilities between them being pertinent, it is a tactic often used by Mohinder that comes with a very high risk. Mohinder, after all, has no idea how Sylar will react and even though Mohinder’s death is not in the cards, the withholding of that information affords Sylar an edge that he plays very carefully.

“Then the muttering is for my benefit?” Sylar tilts his head, knowingly.

“But of course. Don’t you know everything I do is with you in mind?” Mohinder redirects his gaze out the train window as it rumbles through the tunnel.

Sylar follows his gaze and regards their reflection in the window. With his eyes to the glass he observes himself moving closer to Mohinder, bringing his lips to his ear. He turns towards Mohinder and whispers, “I’ll be sure to keep that in mind.”

Sylar can feel Mohinder fighting to stand his ground, refusing to give up any millimeter of space. Pulling back slightly, all the better to appreciate Mohinder’s visage, Sylar trails his eyes along the strong lines of his tensed jaw and the crinkled skin that marks his narrowed eyes which are steadfastly focused straight ahead. He can hear the forced exhalations of Mohinder’s shortened breath as his stress levels rise and Sylar allows for a reprieve by taking a step back.

“Is it really necessary—,”   
“Don’t worry yourself—,”

Speaking over each other they both abruptly stop and Mohinder looks at him, his forehead lined by unfinished questions. Sylar is tempted to draw it out, ensuring Mohinder’s undivided attention, but he decides he would much rather engage in one of their riddled conversations instead.

“This isn’t a social experiment,” Sylar says with an air of put upon annoyance. “I wasn’t following you, no matter how important that would secretly make you feel.”

“Please. As if I—,”

“Don’t bother lying. It doesn’t work with me now.”

The train screeches to a stop and a wave of people move off and on, filling in the spaces around them. The doors close and the underground journey continues. Holding on to the overhead bar with his left hand, Mohinder uses his free one to adjust the strap of his shoulder bag. He shifts to the right, looking at the other passengers then meets Sylar’s watchful eyes.

“Then it’s a coincidence that we’re bumping into each other before tonight’s meeting?” Mohinder asks.

“Despite appearances—or whatever it is you’ve convinced yourself of—yes.” Sylar balances forward, using his hold on the bar to keep him from falling into Mohinder while simultaneously pushing across the invisible boundary between them. “But if you’d prefer, consider this the preamble to the meeting at Parkman’s.”

“Wonderful. So all indications are that it will be business as usual.”

“With you pretending that it’s beneath your moral code to work with me? Most definitely.”

“I’m hardly pretending.”

“Convince me.”

“Excuse me?”

Sylar observes Mohinder’s surprised expression with bemusement. Finding (or in this case stumbling) upon the words that catch Mohinder off guard is a small yet noteworthy checkmark in the win category for Sylar. The train shakes and Sylar uses the barest touch of telekinesis to keep Mohinder and himself from losing their footing.

“Convince me,” Sylar says once balance is restored, “that us working together is everything you purport to hate.”

Mohinder’s eyes move shiftily and his lips part and close with no words coming forth. Eventually he says, “I don’t have to convince you of anything. It goes without saying.”

The delayed response is enough and Sylar nods. “There are a lot of things that don’t need to be said out loud.”

His tone is teasing but the gaze Mohinder levels at him confirms that the trace of thoughtfulness in the minute perception of an inflection that lifts up at the end of the sentence is not lost between them. The moment is interrupted by the sudden stop of the train jerking the cars back and forth. The movement pushes Mohinder into him, bumping chest to chest, but curiously to Sylar, Mohinder does not immediately step back. Later on when he replays the scenario in his mind he may argue that it was the mass of other passengers pressed together that kept Mohinder from moving away as he was want to do. Sylar would find a way to counter that possible reading, and in this moment that casual reading is given no thought.

Their bodies forced together; Sylar is only vaguely aware of the shift in the passengers around them, jostling as they head to the opening doors. Truth be told, he is as caught up in Mohinder’s dark brown eyes, the insistent stare, as he guesses—hopes—Mohinder is in his. The barrier of clothing does little to disguise the matching heat of their bodies and Sylar can nearly taste the mint gum Mohinder must have been chewing earlier that day.

In the motion of the stop, Mohinder had lost his grip on the overhead bar and his arms now hover at his side conveying his uncertainty about where to place them. Sylar, still maintaining a firm hold on the bar with his right hand, raises his left one, but halfway through the movement even he is unsure about what to do with it. It would be as easy to thrust it into his pocket as it would be to clasp Mohinder’s shoulder and continue skirting the line that separates calculated taunting and undeniable wonder.

But what he sees before him entrenches his own speculative uncertainty—Mohinder’s eyes are not angry. They are not narrowed or unblinking in a challenging display. His eyes are wide and there is a lack of resolve in the way they dance the smallest of distances rather than remaining steady. It happens so fast that if Sylar were not paying such unaffected attention he would not notice it—Mohinder’s gaze flits downwards to Sylar’s mouth, then back up.

_There it is,_ Sylar thinks but he censors the smile he feels. He does not want to ruin this.

“Isn’t this your stop?” Sylar asks instead.

The question snaps Mohinder to attention and they both look quickly to the door as the last of the passengers exists and a new wave rushes on. Sylar settles his attention on Mohinder as he steps away.

“Tonight then.”

Mohinder glances back. “I’ll try to contain my excitement,” he says and bumps into an older man who is in the doorway.

“Watch it!” the man snaps and Mohinder offers a rushed apology as he steps off the train.

The doors close and Sylar tries to follow Mohinder’s figure as he moves across the window, briskly walking the length of the platform. Unexpectedly he catches the eyes of the young woman who has been standing behind Mohinder during the trip and has surely heard part of their conversation. She eyes him curiously and Sylar grins. “He’s always had a flair for the dramatic.”

She muffles a laugh and turns her back to him. Sylar looks to the window while the train proceeds to the next destination. The smile falls from his face as he looks on pensively.

 

************ ********** ********** ********** ********** **

 

Spotting Mohinder on the train platform had been little more than chance. Sylar, caught up in a tumble of thoughts, had been contemplating the possibility of how many people waiting around him might possess desirable abilities that would be better used by him. He had made handiwork of Elle’s list within the weeks that followed her death and was struck by how many people were still unaccounted for by The Company, Pinehurst, and the (sentimental favourite) list begun by Chandra and continued by Mohinder.

Standing back from the platform’s edge, Sylar had nonchalantly observed the scatterings of bodies that littered the space, so casually going through life with little care for the worrisome changes slowly and quietly being implemented by Senator Nathan Petrelli, working the President into his pocket.

The upside of slow and calculated progress was that it allowed those opposed to it the chance to organize while drawing no unwanted attention as they pretended to lead normal lives. Though Sylar scoffed at Peter becoming a paramedic or Claire making an attempt at freshman life in university, he was secretly annoyed that he could not fit back into life as a watchmaker for the time being. His arsenal of powers made him far too much of a target to play house with little consequences.

Sparing Peter’s life once upon a time meant the younger Petrelli honoured some sort of undefined payback by helping him disguise his tracks (and remain inconspicuous in public) while doing important but boring field work involving deliveries amongst other guarded factions of their underground organization. It was a necessary evil but not as thankless as Mohinder’s.

A foreigner in America, no matter what the degree or qualifications, was still not a full-fledged person in the eyes of the government or employers. Where he should have been teaching at university or working in a research lab, he was relegated to driving a cab, another nameless, faceless shadow in the crowd. He pretended not to be bothered by it, but Sylar saw the hurt pride in the bashful smile and withheld eye contact he offered Peter when he arrived at meetings a bit disheveled and tired from long hours behind the wheel.

These were the spiraling thoughts Sylar was lost in when the train pulled into the station and he caught sight of a familiar face further down the platform. It was rare that Sylar saw Mohinder outside of the confines of a scheduled meeting and he nearly missed getting on the train from the unexpected sensation of time stopping.

Immediately realizing he was one car down, Sylar pushed through the wall of bodies and slid open the door that linked the cars, stepping into the one that held Mohinder. Sylar scanned the half-filled car until he spotted the man he was looking for standing near the center with one hand extended upward to grip the overhead bar and a blank look on his face as he stared at defaced advertisements and smartly avoided unnecessary eye contact with those that made up his urban environment.

Sylar stayed back. Watching Mohinder was a pastime that had become more pronounced in recent months with the increase in Resistance meetings. And seeing him away from that was to see him outside of his element while unhindered by the façade put on for the benefit of others. Mohinder had always struck Sylar’s inquisitive interest though the motivations behind it had changed with time and circumstance. The more they moved about each other the less Sylar could ignore the depth of what was being altered bit by bit inside him.

It was much easier in the earlier days when his methods were dictated by a singular focus—himself. Mohinder, out of the shadows of Sylar’s desperate, cryptic, sordid origins, had proved a far worthier opponent than he should have. But in retrospect Sylar knew that it was not the audacious fight and intellectual match of someone who should have been no more than an inconsequential footnote, that bothered him. What was troubling was that Sylar actually liked him, nearly from the start—and Sylar did not like anyone.

The train shook and lurched within the curved terrain of the tunnel and Sylar watched Mohinder sway unsteadily before tightening his hand around the bar. His hair had gotten longer, sending the curls spiraling unkempt partway down his neck and like a crown peeking around his ears. By contrast his face was shaven clean. Sylar could smell the shaving cream that was used, the only unnaturally created smell on Mohinder’s body except for the antiperspirant and hint of soap. Everything else was purely him and much stronger than chemical masks.

For a moment Sylar closed his eyes and directed all his senses Mohinder’s way. Smiling to himself, Sylar was transported to the much needed calm he had clung to when the acquisition of Dale’s super hearing had nearly split his head in two (no pun intended). The only thing that had worked was to listen and control the volume of the rush of blood that raced through Mohinder’s body in the driver’s seat and then with that under his power Sylar had taught himself to play with the volume of different noises while attempting to engage in normal sounding conversation.

Without knowing it Mohinder had helped him with a most convenient ability but in the process Sylar had lost sight of his purpose. Or maybe it had become clearer? Before New York rose up from the distant horizon Sylar already knew that Mohinder would never die intentionally at his hands.

Feeling the train slow and then stop, Sylar opened his eyes and saw Mohinder rub the back of his neck, making a vaguely pained face as he rolled his head to the left and right to work out the kink in his muscle. That exhaustion, hiding frustration, was a familiar trait Sylar witnessed play out with Mohinder time and time again. Where he once would have rolled his eyes discreetly at the display of uselessness, Sylar eventually found himself wanting to ease Mohinder’s discomfort of mind and body.

But by the time that realization had unwrapped itself it was too late. The seeds of animosity were sewn. What had once been an act of contrition was then relegated to a betrayal that pushed them both to the precipice they would forever teeter on. Mohinder’s self-doubt and irritated self-directed jabs, then, were met by Sylar’s watching idle form from across the room while pretending to either not care what Peter was saying or flipping through a random book.

More often, however, he was finding it difficult to stay back, not when he knew he could be the voice of understanding or reason—or a challenging soundboard—that Mohinder needed; not careless like Bennet or Parkman who had other more pressing concerns, and certainly not like Peter with his myriad of mixed emotions.

Bodies moved about the train, the ebb and flow of the daily commute in full force. Sylar took a few steps forward and saw Mohinder give a polite yet distracted closed mouth smile to the young woman squeezing past him to stand at his other side. The doors closed and the train rumbled on.

Friend was not a word Sylar put too much faith in. It had always felt like a banal term with little value beyond making one seem important based on the numbers that could be claimed. Sylar saw little purpose to it and was further affirmed in his position by the fact that no one really measured up to what he would deem acceptable. It had been different in elementary school when Brian Tolnachuk had been as much a confidante as kids could be with one another. But high school had been a battlefield and what Sylar had thought was friendship was revealed as a ruse; a childhood daydream that gave way to the reality of broken personalities and corrupt dispositions. He refused to play the game and while others punished him through alienation he found refuge in himself and his refusal to be dismantled.

The occasional connection did not count. It was temporary and more often than not a means to an end. But Mohinder—he was anything but temporary, and Sylar, during long nights staring at the ceiling or passing time in an office building’s lobby waiting for the arrival of a specific mark to unwillingly add to his incredible repertoire, considered that Mohinder was always meant to be a permanent in his life.

It was hardly a welcome epiphany that Mohinder, of all people, should get him. Though maybe it was that lack of appreciation that diffused Sylar’s instinctive reaction to fight it, and rather be (cautiously) open to what it all meant. But what _did _it all mean? They danced through a set of predetermined steps each and every time and argumentative banter was the foreplay to them finally getting on with addressing the subject at hand, whatever that may be.

Once in awhile Sylar found the exercise more effort than it was worth, wanting to skip to the heartfelt or at least even-keeled exchange of thoughts. Yet it was a difficult habit to break and under the watchful eyes of others he preferred to play the disaffected part than answer accusatory questions that were no one else’s business.

It was troubling enough that Sylar felt pulled along an invisible magnetic line towards Mohinder. He could control the nonsensical illogic of it all. It was Mohinder, however, that was proving to be a mind warp. Sylar’s head was so twisted in on itself that he could not say if he was simply misreading Mohinder and seeing what he wanted to, or if Mohinder housed a reflective confusion as to there being something more.

The brush of Mohinder’s arm against his back when he walked by to approach Peter could be no more than a comment on the confined space of the apartment they were all meeting in. Mohinder scoffing at one of Sylar’s verbal jabs at Bennet might not be a shared laugh but a normal reaction to Bennet being reprimanded. Mohinder backing away a second too late after Sylar leaned into him could just as easily be out of defiance. Mohinder siding with him on a tactic was just work—debating on each other’s behalf was putting the greater good first for Mohinder and self-preservation for Sylar. The eyes—

That was when Sylar lost his footing and the thread of a rational tangent of thought. There was the purposeful avoidance of eye contact that, in itself, was the equivalent of unencumbered staring. Mohinder, arms folded across his chest, would look at Peter, the floor, the laptop, but he (too) carefully skirted around Sylar’s frame, acquiescing a brief glance here and there to convey the required appearance of resigned indifference.

In light of Sylar’s past with him, and the general countenance with which Sylar carried himself, no one batted an eye at Sylar intently watching him, whether while leaning against the wall or sitting at the kitchen table or even stretched out overconfidently across the living room sofa. He could just as easily present himself as taunting and forceful, as aloof and uncaring, within any given circumstances as any of them.

Until Mohinder broke his own rules.

When the good doctor masquerading as a cab driver refused to meet Peter’s eyes out of distaste for the job he was forced to take under the pretense of being normal, he held Sylar’s eyes instead. Not for long, but enough for Sylar to suspect that Mohinder knew he would get the reason behind his irritation at what life required of him. A humbled existence, it was something they both knew from personal experience to be an honest living but a stagnant one nonetheless.

Mohinder allowed himself to be a bit more brutal within the guise of plausible deniability at those meetings or he considered a two sentence reply that dripped in sarcasm sufficient before moving on with a less adversarial tone.

Sylar could still hypothesize those. It was when he found—_caught_—Mohinder staring—_watching_—him that his own place was suddenly undefined. Flipping through a book, Sylar would glance up to where Peter and Mohinder were talking. Peter, hands up at his side, would be dramatically emphasizing a point, but Mohinder’s gaze would be on Sylar, not out of anger but pensive; curiosity would rest beneath a wrinkled brow and matched by a slightly parted mouth. Three seconds translated into their own private sphere and then Mohinder turned to his side to face Peter directly, leaving Sylar to return to his book while his mind rewound and analyzed everything.

Similarly, he had caught Mohinder eyeing him (he was sure of it…at first) when he had been forced to change out of a ruined shirt, soiled from a blood fight that got out of hand. It may very well have been the fact that it was Mohinder’s shirt he was forced to change into by Bennet that was an insult to Mohinder’s perturbed mind. Still, after cleaning up in the bathroom he had walked into the living room, slipping the shirt on over his head and stretching it out slightly to fit his arms through the sleeves. He heard Parkman and Peter disagreeing about some Special and as he pulled the shirt down to cover his stomach he had looked up to find Mohinder leaning against the kitchen counter staring at his chest and the downward movement of the material. Unable to help himself he had given Mohinder a knowing smirk only to have Mohinder quickly turn around and pour the kettle of boiling water into a mug.

There were a handful like those that Sylar replayed in his mind, sometimes inquiringly and other times when his mind slipped into a daydream. Increasingly those moments were playing havoc and he disliked the strangeness of being in a position he could not explain or intuitively make sense of.

He regarded Mohinder staring out the train window for a moment then decided that an opportunity like this deserved a chance to either dissuade him his misreading or add fuel to the fire. Guessing where Mohinder would be getting off, Sylar figured he only had a small window and the first part would surely be chilly wit. Besides, it would be fun trying to set the stage for that night’s meeting.

Sylar slowly made his way forward and hesitated mid-step when Mohinder’s body suddenly tensed. Sylar continued and Mohinder looked to his right, their gazes meeting.

Before Sylar could say anything, Mohinder sighed a huff of annoyance and said, “Do you never tire of stalking me?”   
 


End file.
